AMSTERDAM (ANP) - Het gerechtshof in Amsterdam heeft Ali B donderdag veroordeeld tot een celstraf van drie jaar voor de verkrachting van een vrouw tijdens een schrijverskamp in Heiloo en de verkrachting van Ellen ten Damme in een hotel in Marokko.
De straf is hoger dan het OM had geëist. Het Openbaar Ministerie vroeg in hoger beroep om een celstraf van 2,5 jaar. De rechtbank in Haarlem veroordeelde de rapper in 2024 tot een celstraf van twee jaar.
AMSTERDAM (ANP) - Het gerechtshof in Amsterdam acht Ali B (44) schuldig aan een verkrachting van Ellen ten Damme in een hotel in Marokko.
Zangeres Ten Damme verklaarde in 2022 bij de politie dat ze in april 2014 verkracht is door Ali B in een Marokkaans hotel, rond tv-opnames voor het AVROTROS-programma Ali B en de Muziekkaravaan. Ali B kwam de slaapkamer van het slachtoffer binnen, met zijn broek omlaag, en besprong de zangeres in bed. Zij deed geen aangifte, maar deelde wel haar ervaringen met de politie, waarin het OM genoeg bewijs zag voor vervolging.
AMSTERDAM (ANP) - Het gerechtshof in Amsterdam heeft Ali B vrijgesproken van aanranding van zangeres Jill Helena in 2018. Er is onvoldoende steunbewijs. Het Openbaar Ministerie had om dezelfde reden om vrijspraak gevraagd.
Jill Helena heeft in haar aangifte tegen Ali B verklaard dat hij haar in mei 2018 na een show in Monnickendam, waar ze allebei optraden, had meegenomen naar het Martin Luther Kingpark, waar ze de rapper volgens de aanklacht moest aftrekken.
Ze zou hebben aangegeven in de auto geen seks met hem te willen hebben. Ze kenden elkaar van The Voice of Holland, waarin zij finalist was en hij haar coach. Ze hadden daarna een tijd een seksuele relatie.
Ali B ontkent de aanranding. Hij zegt dat er niets zonder haar toestemming is gebeurd. De zangeres heeft twee jaar later haar moeder verteld over de vermeende aanranding en dat is onvoldoende voor wettig bewijs.
AMSTERDAM (ANP) - Het gerechtshof in Amsterdam oordeelt in de zedenzaak tegen Ali B dat er voldoende wettig en overtuigend bewijs is voor het verkrachten van een vrouw tijdens een schrijverskamp in Heiloo in 2018.
Het slachtoffer verklaarde bij de politie dat Ali B zijn vingers bij haar ongevraagd en onverhoeds naar binnen bracht, terwijl zij in een slaapkamer van de villa orale seks had met rapper Ronnie Flex. Kort daarvoor zou ze door de verdachte zijn aangerand in de woonkeuken, maar daarvoor ziet het hof te weinig steunbewijs.
Het hof vindt haar verklaringen over de penetratie betrouwbaar genoeg.
Herinner je hem nog? De beruchte duckface. Ingezogen wangen, getuite lippen, telefoon schuin van boven en een hand op de heup. Jarenlang was het dé pose op sociale media. Van tienerkamers tot de selfies van Kim Kardashian en de Olsen Twins: iedereen deed eraan mee.
Nu is de pose officieel afgeschreven. Te gemaakt, te millennial, zwaar cringe. Maar lachend en spontaan op de foto, dat gaan we zeker niet doen. De opvolger is al gearriveerd: de Gen Z-pout. Denk aan een subtiele pruillip gecombineerd met een emotieloze blik, populair gemaakt door sterren als Lily-Rose Depp en Rachel Sennott.
De pose liet lippen voller lijken en maakte gezichten slanker. Maar er speelde meer. Begin jaren 2000 explodeerden sociale media dankzij platforms als Myspace. Ineens konden mensen zichzelf constant online presenteren.
Met de komst van cameratelefoons kon je bovendien eerst zelf zien hoe je eruitzag voordat anderen dat deden. De duckface werd zo een veilige pose in een tijd waarin iedereen bekeken wilde worden, maar wel op zijn eigen voorwaarden.
Schrijver en kunstcriticus John Berger beschreef dat al in zijn boek Ways of Seeing, lezen we in het NRC. “Zelfs wanneer ze alleen is, heeft de vrouw nog gezelschap van haar zelfbeeld”, schreef Berger.
Volgens die theorie kijken mensen voortdurend naar zichzelf door de ogen van anderen. Selfies zijn een manier om die blik te controleren.
De Gen Z-pout lijkt afstandelijker. Minder “kijk naar mij”, meer “het interesseert me niet”. Maar dat is schijn. Ook deze look is zorgvuldig ingestudeerd. Op TikTok circuleren inmiddels talloze tutorials om de perfecte ‘ongeïnteresseerde’ blik te oefenen.
Waar de duckface om aandacht vroeg, doet de Gen Z-pout alsof aandacht onbelangrijk is, met als doel om precies dezelfde aandacht te krijgen. De selfie verandert dus steeds van gezicht. Maar het doel blijft hetzelfde: bepalen hoe de wereld naar je kijkt.
Bron: NRC
DEN HAAG (ANP) - Een stewardess van KLM wordt getest op het hantavirus. Dat bevestigt het ministerie van Volksgezondheid na berichtgeving van RTL Nieuws. De vrouw uit Haarlem was eerder in het Zuid-Afrikaanse Johannesburg in contact gekomen met een Nederlandse vrouw die later overleed aan het virus.
De stewardess is met milde klachten opgenomen in het UMC in Amsterdam, aldus het ministerie. Daar ligt ze in isolatie.
De 69-jarige vrouw ging op 25 april aan boord van een vlucht van KLM van Johannesburg naar Amsterdam, maar de bemanning besloot uiteindelijk de vrouw om haar gezondheidstoestand niet mee te nemen. Ze overleed een dag later. Passagiers aan boord van deze vlucht worden door de GGD geïnformeerd.
AMSTERDAM (ANP) - De AEX-index op het Damrak is donderdag met een klein verlies begonnen na het bereiken van een nieuw slotrecord een dag eerder. Beleggers verwerkten opnieuw een grote hoeveelheid kwartaalresultaten van bedrijven als Shell, SBM Offshore, BAM, AMG en Pharming.
Shell zakte 3 procent. Het olie- en gasconcern boekte in het eerste kwartaal flink meer winst door de sterk gestegen olieprijzen vanwege de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten. Shell had al gezegd dat de resultaten uit de oliehandel aanzienlijk hoger zouden uitvallen door de onrust op de energiemarkt. Inmiddels zijn de olieprijzen echter gezakt door hoop op een einde aan het conflict.
De Amsterdamse hoofdindex noteerde in de ochtendhandel 0,3 procent lager op 1028,76 punten. Woensdag steeg de AEX 1,7 procent tot een nieuw slotrecord van 1031,44 punten, door de hoop op een spoedig einde aan de Iranoorlog. De index verbrak daarmee het record van net voor de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten. De MidKap klom 0,2 procent tot 1065,98 punten. Frankfurt en Parijs wonnen tot 0,6 procent. Londen verloor 0,5 procent.
Ayden
Naast Shell stond RELX (min 5,7 procent) in de staartgroep van de AEX. Zakenbank Morgan Stanley verlaagde het advies voor de dataleverancier. Ook noteert RELX ex-dividend, wat betekent dat het aandeel geen recht meer geeft op het dividend over de afgelopen periode. Betaalbedrijf Adyen en techinvesteerder Prosus waren de sterkste stijgers, met winsten van rond de 2 procent.
SBM Offshore daalde 0,8 procent. De oliedienstverlener verhoogde de omzetverwachting voor het hele jaar na een sterke groei in het eerste kwartaal. Topman Øivind Tangen sprak van een "solide" start van het jaar en verwacht dat de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten weinig impact zal hebben op de activiteiten van het bedrijf.
Bouwer BAM daalde
In de MidKap steeg AMG bijna 6 procent. De metalengroep zag het kwartaalresultaat licht stijgen, terwijl het bedrijf had gerekend op een daling. Bouwer BAM en vermogensbeheerder Van Lanschot Kempen daalden tot 1,4 procent na publicatie van de resultaten.
Pharming kelderde bijna 15 procent. De biotechnoloog zag de omzet dalen door lagere verkopen van het middel Ruconest. Branchegenoot Galapagos verloor ruim 1 procent. Het biotechnologiebedrijf, dat op 8 mei wordt omgedoopt in Lakefront Biotherapeutics, zag de omzet flink dalen in het eerste kwartaal. Door een sterke daling van de kosten boekte het bedrijf wel weer winst, na een verlies een jaar eerder.
Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:
The former Sands & McDougall building facade is an outstanding and early example of Art Deco architecture in South Australia. The facade is highly intact and demonstrates many of the key attributes of the style, including vertical form; concentration of ornamentation at the top of the building; and stylised decorations made from coloured-pressed Portland cement, copper panels, and metal grilles to the upper storey windows. The Art Deco remodelling of the facade transformed the nineteenth century classical building, eschewing the past and expressing optimism for the future.
The first and oldest surviving art deco façade in South Australia was saved in 2020 from being obliterated by a 15-storey office block project for King William Street, Adelaide city.
A backlash and official intervention meant the Sands and McDougall building frontage and canopy was incorporated within a three-storey podium on King William Street, providing an entry to the office tower.
The Sands and McDougall façade was designed in 1933 by Adelaide architects Philip Claridge, Lionel Gregor Bruer and Norman G. Fisher for the Melbourne stationer, bookseller, printer and account book manufacturing firm that set up an office in South Australia in 1882. The façade for the 1933 building, that housed a printing press, had geometrical patterns, shells and circular motifs on the parapet, fluted panels between the windows, and metal grilles on the second floor windows.
Australian developer Charter Hall lodged plans with the State Commission Assessment Panel (SCAP) in July 2020 to bulldoze the Southern Cross Arcade and neighbouring Sands and McDougall building to make way for a 15-storey office tower with ground-floor retail space. In August 2020, the South Australian Heritage Council decided to provisionally list the building at 64 King William Street from local heritage to a state heritage place, describing its “highly intact” façade as an “outstanding and early example of art deco architecture in South Australia”.
Adelaide city council confirmed it would not support demolishing the Sands and McDougall building – regardless of whether its state heritage listing was confirmed. South Australian government environment minister David Speirs then rejected a request from Charter Hall to intervene in a Heritage Council decision and fast tracked the listing of the Sands and McDougall building’s façade and canopy onto the state’s heritage register: “It’s my view that the developer didn’t place enough significance on the status of local heritage listing.” Art Deco and Modernism Society’s Adelaide chapter president David O’Loughlin, also president of the Australian Local Government Association, was “absolutely delighted” by Speirs’ decision.
Under new design for the building, by Cox Architecture, the newly state-heritage-listed Sands and McDougall building façade was incorporated into the new building design. The architects sought to “provide a sense of the former footprint of the (Sands and MacDougall) building within the entrance foyer” by including a lounge area directly behind the retained façade. The façade would be activated with a new entrance door visible both from outside and within the foyer. The podium treatment along King William Street was lifted to three storeys next to the heritage façade.
It was acknowledged that the “heritage façade and canopy will form a prominent entrance to the office tower and will ultimately assist in providing a level of recognition and identity to the office tower above.”
Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:
This would be one of the most beautiful industrial buildings I've ever come across.
It is the former Adelaide Electric Supply Co. Converter Station in Chancery Lane, Adelaide CBD.
It is heritage listed, so hopefully it remains for good.
Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:
Adelaide Town Hall reflected in the building across the street. King William Street, Adelaide CBD
I am on record as saying that every economic bubble is terrible, but some bubbles do at least leave behind a salvageable productive residue while others leave behind nothing but ashes; indeed, this is the thesis of my next book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
Here's a historical comparison that's illuminating: Enron vs Worldcom. Both were monumental frauds, the CEOs of both companies died shortly after the frauds were discovered, but they have very different legacies. Enron – a scam that pretended to secure billions of dollars' worth of new efficiencies through "energy trading" but was actually just engineering rolling blackouts in order to jack up energy prices – left behind nothing.
Well, not quite nothing. Enron did leave behind a little useful residue after it burned to the ground: a giant repository of emails. You see, after Enron went bust, it was sued by its creditors, who demanded access to relevant emails from the company's Outlook server. But the company execs decided they didn't want to spend the money to weed out the irrelevant emails before the court-mandated disclosure, so instead they published all the emails ever sent or received by anyone at Enron, including tons of extremely private, personal, sensitive information relating to Enron's employees and customers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_Corpus
This became the "Enron Corpus" and it was the first large tranche of emails that were in the public domain and available to researchers. As a result, it became the gold standard dataset for researchers investigating social graphs, natural language, and many other subjects that subsequently became very important computer science fields and commercial applications.
As legacies go, the Enron Corpus is pretty small ball, and even so, it is decidedly mixed, both because the Enron Corpus constitutes a gross, ongoing privacy violation for a huge number of people; and because a lot of that social graph and natural language work that it jumpstarted has been put to deeply shitty purposes.
Then there's Worldcom: also a gigantic fraud, Worldcom falsified billions of dollars' worth of orders for new fiber optic lines, which it then dug up streets all over the world and installed. When Worldcom went bankrupt, all that fiber stayed in the ground, and many people are still using it today. My home in Burbank has a 2GB symmetrical fiber connection through AT&T that runs on old Worldcom fiber that AT&T bought up for pennies on the dollar.
So while you have to squint really hard to find any benefit that can be salvaged from Enron, it's really easy to point at Worldcom's productive residue – it's a ton of fiber and conduit running under the streets of major cities around the world, ready to be lit up and bring the people nearby into the 21st century. Fiber, after all, is amazing, literally thousands of times better than copper or 5G or Starlink:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/07/swisscom/#stacked
Even though Enron's CEO Ken Lay and Worldcom's CEO Bernie Ebbers both received prison sentences after their fraud was revealed, the bubbles never stopped, and indeed, they only got worse. AI is the biggest bubble in human history, worse even than the South Sea Bubble:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company
And like those earlier bubbles, some of our modern bubbles will leave behind nothing, while others will leave behind some productive residue. Take the cryptocurrency bubble. Crypto will go to zero, and when it does, all it will leave behind is shitty monkey JPEGs and even worse Austrian economics:
https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
As with Enron, you can find some productive residue from cryptocurrency if you look hard enough. A lot of programmers have had a heavily subsidized education in Rust programming and cryptographic fundamentals, both of which are unalloyed goods in our otherwise very insecure digital world.
Some of the underlying mechanisms from the crypto are useful, even without blockchains. Take Metalabel, a system that lets collaborators on creative projects automate how they handle revenues from those projects by plugging DAO-like logic into traditional, dollar-based bank accounts. They're recycling some of the tooling from the crypto bubble to create a very useful utility, without the crypto:
But, as with the Enron Corpus, this is pretty small ball. The world has flushed away hundreds of billions to get paltry millions' worth of value out of crypto – the rest of that value disappeared into the pockets of crooked insiders who defrauded the public into parting with their savings.
If crypto will be Enron-like in its post-bubble life, what about AI? I think AI is more like Worldcom: there's a bunch of useful stuff that AI can do, after all. Take away the bubble and we'd call the things AI can do "plug-ins" and some people would use them, and others wouldn't, and some of those uses would be productive, and others would be foolish, but we wouldn't bet the world's economy on them, nor would we squander our last dribbles of potable water to cool their data centers.
After the AI bubble pops, there will be a lot of durable residue. The data centers will still stand. The GPUs will still be there, and if we don't "sweat the assets" by running them as hot and hard as they can tolerate, they won't burn out in 2-3 years. There will be lots of applied statisticians, skilled data-labelers, etc, looking for work. And there will be lots of open source models that have barely been optimized (why make an open source model more efficient when you're raising capital based on the promise of outspending everyone else in order to dominate a world of ubiquitous, pluripotent, winner-take-all centralized AI?):
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/16/post-ai-ai/#productive-residue
That's a situation not unlike the post-dotcom bubble of the early 2000s. Almost overnight, the legion of humanities undergrads who'd been treated to subsidized training in perl, Python and HTML found themselves looking for work. Servers could be purchased in bulk for pennies on the dollar (with user data still on them!). I bought a "dining room set" of six $1,000+ fancy office chairs for $50 each (still wrapped in plastic!) from a dotcom founder who was selling them on the sidewalk out front of his failed startup's office in the Mission. He offered to sell me ten lifetime's supply of branded t-shirts for $20. I turned him down.
That was the birth of Web 2.0. All of a sudden, people who wanted to make real things that were good could do so, because they could find skilled workers, hardware, and office space at such knock-down prices that they could be funded out of pocket or put on a credit card. People got to pursue the web they wanted, free from asshole bosses and VCs. Not everything that got built in those heady days was good, but many good things got built.
I can easily imagine that the post-bubble AI scene will produce benefits comparable to Web 2.0 – projects built by and for people who want to do useful and fun things, without being distracted by the mirage of illusory billions promised by the stock swindlers who created the bubble.
I can easily imagine that I will find some of those post-bubble tools useful, and that in 20 years I will still be using them, just as today, I am still using some of those early post-dotcom bubble services and tools.
And despite all that, IT IS NOT WORTH IT.
The residue that is left behind by every bubble is subsidized, but that subsidy doesn't come from the deep-pocketed investors who are gripped by "irrational exuberance." It comes from mom-and-pop, normie, retail investors who have been tricked into giving their money to the insiders who inflated the bubble.
From Worldcom to Enron, from crypto to AI, the point of the bubble wasn't ever the residue or lack thereof – it was a transfer from working people to crooks. Bubbles are a system for moving the painfully sequestered life's savings of people who do things to people who steal things.
Since the Carter years, workers have been forced to flush their savings into the stock market, after the traditional "defined benefits pension" (that guarantees you an inflation-adjusted sum every month until you die) was replaced with 401(k)s and other "market-based pensions" (where you only get to survive after retirement if you bet correctly on the movement of stocks):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/29/against-cozy-catastrophies/
Despite this having all the appearances of a rigged game – finance industry insiders are always going to be better at betting on stocks than teachers, nurses, janitors and other productive workers – proponents of this system always insisted that workers weren't really the suckers at the table. But the stock market is like Kalshi or Polymarket in that one bettor's losses are another bettor's gains, and in those markets, nearly all the money is harvested by less than 1% of bettors:
Somehow, supposedly, we could beat those insiders and survive into our old age without having to eat dog food or become a burden on our kids by betting on the whole market, through index-tracker funds:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/17/shareholder-socialism/#asset-manager-capitalism
Supposedly, this would "diversify" our portfolios, which would insulate us from risks we could not understand, much less estimate. But thanks to private equity and the AI bubble, betting on "the whole market" is basically "betting on AI." 35% of the S&P 500 is tied up in seven AI companies, who are engaged in the obviously fraudulent (and Worldcom-adjacent) practice of passing the same $100b IOU around really quickly and pretending it's in all their bank accounts at once:
https://www.fool.com/investing/2025/11/05/ai-growth-stocks-is-there-still-room-to-run/
When the AI bubble pops, it will vaporize (at least) 35% of the US stock market and wipe out everyday savers who have been swindled into betting their futures on AI, based on the fraudulent representations of AI pitchmen. Millions of people who worked hard all their lives and deprived themselves of small comforts in order to save for their retirement will be wiped out. They will be made dependent on the Social Security system that Republicans are determined to starve into bankruptcy and then turn into (yet another) "market based system" that you will be required to convert into chips at the stock market casino where you're up against professional players who hold all the cards:
https://www.newsweek.com/major-social-security-change-proposed-to-build-wealth-11727844
Annihilating a third of the stock market will have severe knock-on effects, even though the median US worker only has $955 saved for retirement:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/955-saved-for-retirement-millions-are-in-that-boat-150003868.html
Because wiping out the life's savings of everyone else will tank consumption for a generation. Retirees who have to sell their family homes to pay their medical bills won't be buying breakfast at the local diner or catching a Tuesday night movie. They won't be indulging their grandkids with nice birthday presents or helping their own kids buy their first home.
Worse still: the only thing our society knows how to do about economic catastrophe (for now, anyway) is to impose brutal austerity, and austerity drives voters into the arms of fascist strongmen, who blame all their woes on a scapegoated minority in order to win office, and then steal everything that's not nailed down:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/12/always-great/#our-nhs
Which is all to say, there's a world of difference between recognizing that the AI bubble is the superior sort of bubble in that it will leave a productive residue, and endorsing the AI bubble as a productive or morally acceptable way to produce that residue. It's one thing to anticipate salvaging something useful out of a catastrophe, and another thing altogether to deliberate induce or prolong that catastrophe so as to maximize the amount of salvage.
The swindlers who created this bubble are crooks who have set out to destroy the futures of a generation of savers. They are monsters, and their bubble needs to be popped as quickly as possible.
Unsolicited https://www.jennyvolvovski.com/category/unsolicited
Half of Labour’s Voters Set to Abandon Party in England as Keir Starmer’s ‘London Wall’ Crumbles https://bylinetimes.com/2026/05/06/exclusive-poll-half-of-labours-voters-set-to-abandon-party-in-england-as-keir-starmers-london-wall-crumbles/
Am I Meant To Be Impressed? https://www.wheresyoured.at/am-i-meant-to-be-impressed/
Froth is a small live lexical language for programmable devices https://frothlang.org/
#20yrsago Judge mocks FCC’s legal argument for wiretapping VoIP https://web.archive.org/web/20060512141440/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004638.php
#20yrsago Podcasting saved from the UN — for now https://web.archive.org/web/20060603152220/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004637.php
#15yrsago Two billion people and the royal wedding: pretty damned unlikely https://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2011/05/06/2-billion-viewers/
#15yrsago Mozilla tells DHS: we won’t help you censor the Internet https://torrentfreak.com/homeland-security-wants-mozilla-to-pull-domain-seizure-add-on-110505/
#15yrsago Foxconn workers forced to sign promise not to commit suicide due to working conditions https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/05/foxconn-workers-forced-to-sign-promise-not-to-commit-suicide-due-to-working-conditions/
#15yrsago Shannon’s Law: a story about bridging Faerie and the mundane world with TCP-over-magic https://reactormag.com/shannons-law/
#15yrsago Green Army men with PTSD https://www.wearedorothy.com/collections/artworks/products/casualties-of-war
#10yrsago Deep Insert skimmers: undetectable, disposable short-lived ATM skimmers https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/05/crooks-go-deep-with-deep-insert-skimmers/
#10yrsago How standardizing DRM will make us all less secure https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/standardized-drm-will-make-us-less-safe
#10yrsago Excellent advice for generating and maintaining your passwords https://www.wired.com/2016/05/password-tips-experts/
#10yrsago Amid education funding emergency, Washington State gives Boeing, Microsoft $1B in tax breaks https://jeffreifman.com/2016/05/05/forget-boeing-microsofts-tax-break-costs-776-million/
#5yrsago MRNA vaccines and Clarke's Law https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/05/clarkes-third-law/#indistinguishable-from-magic
#5yrsago Stimmies killed the McJob https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/05/clarkes-third-law/#precariat-nostalgia
#1yrago Bridget Read's 'Little Bosses Everywhere' https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway
Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/speakers/
Virtual: How to Disenshittify the Internet with Wendy Liu (EFF), May 14
https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-enshittification
Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 18
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow-in-der-friesenstrasse-23-kreuzberg-praesentiert-von-otherland.html
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
SXSW London, Jun 2
https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901
NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html
Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales
Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor
When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8
Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612
The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Today's top sources:
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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Zondag wordt de geilste moederdag sinds jaren. Dat stellen analisten. “Ontbijt op bed, klein katertje, complimenten geven, oprechte liefde, en heel veel zwoele foto’s bekijken waar mama teringheet op staat, dat zijn wel de ingrediënten voor een knotshete Moederdag.”
Ook online leeft het flink. Instagram-gebruiker @boris_voetbal_030 laat weten dat hij niet kan wachten om zondag even lekker te geilen. “Shoutout naar iedereen die een story plaatst van z’n ma met ‘fijne moederdag’, jullie zijn legends”.
De afgelopen jaren is er verder een opvallende stijging in de zoekterm ‘MILFs’ tijdens moederdag, analisten verwachten dan ook dat dit dit jaar zal worden doorgezet.
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Jason Atherton, who has restaurants in Dubai, St Moritz and now Tuscany, says it’s tough to stay afloat in UK hospitality industry
A British Michelin-starred chef says he is opening restaurants abroad to subsidise his UK venues against a backdrop of high taxes and a struggling hospitality sector.
Jason Atherton is now in Forte dei Marmi, on the Tuscan coast in Italy, where he is preparing his newest opening, Maria’s, which will be in the Principessa hotel. The Sheffield-born chef now has restaurants all over the world, including in Dubai and St Moritz.
Continue reading...Four empty oil tanks were reportedly damaged, although it’s unclear whether the drones belong to Ukraine or Russia
Latvia is investigating two drones which entered its airspace from Russian territory overnight and crashed in eastern part of the country near an empty oil storage facility.
Four empty oil tanks were reported damaged, with minor smouldering reported in one of the tanks. The local public broadcaster captured a drone flying in the area on their camera.
Continue reading...
Vandaag de laatste dag dat-ie als een naakte klepel heen en weer wordt geslingerd in de klok van het juridische leven: de uitspraak in het hoger beroep van Ali Bouali, de man die eerder tot twee jaar gevangenisstraf werd veroordeeld omdat hij de vrouwtjes nogal opdringerig in zijn broekmicrofoon heeft laten zingen. In eerste aanleg was de eis 36 maanden, in het hoger beroep was de eis 30 maanden. Twee dingen die we niet meer van ons netvlies krijgen: 1) Ali B. heeft een heel rechte piemel, pak er thuis maar eens een lineaal, een potlood, of een tandenborstel uit de iO-serie van Oral B bij. 2) Ali B. is helemaal geen gezellige knuffelmocro, maar een in eerste aanleg voor verkrachting veroordeelde onhebbelijke en gevoelloze narcistische clown, die de helft van de tijd alleen maar aan zichzelf denkt, en de helft van de tijd alleen maar aan z'n piemel. Die heel recht is. Zo meer.
Update 10:03 - Ali B. durft er trouwens niet bij te zijn
Update 10:06 - Voorzitter gerechtshof begint met voorlezen van de uitspraak
Update 10:15 - Dit ziet er niet goed uit (voor Ali)
Update 10:19 - Verkrachting Naomi en verkrachting Ellen ten Damme bewezen, aanranding Jill Helena niet. Hof: Ali B. (achternaam bekend bij redactie) SCHULDIG aan twee verkrachtingen
Update 10:22 - Ali bleef maar ontkennen. Hof: "Hij heeft geen inzicht getoond in het kwaad van zijn handelingen." Handelwijze Ali 'volkomen onaanvaardbaar'.
Update - DRIE JAAR CEL VOOR ALI B. DE VROUWENVERKRACHTER (hoger dus dan de straf in eerste aanleg)
